Why Do Christians Hate Gay People?

It is a deliberately uncomfortable question.

It is also, of course, unfair to millions of Christians who do not hate gay people.

Many Christians welcome gay people into their churches and their lives. Some Christian denominations conduct same-sex marriages. Other Christians retain traditional teachings about marriage and sexuality while being equally clear that those beliefs provide no justification for hatred, humiliation or discrimination.

So the real question is more difficult:

Why have some Christians made gay people such an important target of Christian concern?

Why, among everything Jesus taught about how Christians should live, has another person’s sexual orientation become such a defining issue?

What Did Jesus Actually Say?

There is an important distinction to make here.

Jesus did speak about sexual immorality.

In Matthew 15 and Mark 7, sexual immorality appears among behaviours Jesus says originate within the human heart.

The Greek word commonly translated as sexual immorality is porneia. It is a broad term for illicit sexual conduct. Traditional Christian interpretation has understood it to encompass sexual relations outside the boundaries of marriage, rather than identifying homosexuality as some unique category standing apart from every other question of sexual morality.

That distinction matters.

Jesus is not recorded giving a teaching specifically about homosexuality.

He does discuss sexual morality. But it isn’t presented as“gay people are the problem.”

If Christians want to apply traditional Christian sexual ethics consistently, the questions involved are vastly wider than homosexuality.

They include heterosexual behaviour too.

That immediately raises an uncomfortable question.

Why does one group attract so much attention?

What Did Jesus Say Was Most Important?

When Jesus was asked about the greatest commandment, his response was remarkably clear:

“Thou shalt love the Lord thy God with all thy heart, and with all thy soul, and with all thy mind.”

And then:

“Thou shalt love thy neighbour as thyself.”

And finally:

“On these two commandments hang all the law and the prophets.”

Matthew 22:34–40, King James Version

It is difficult to overstate the significance of that final sentence.

Jesus takes an enormously complicated religious tradition and places love of God and love of neighbour at its centre.

He doesn’t say that nothing else matters.

He doesn’t say the Hebrew Scriptures were meaningless. Indeed, Matthew records Jesus saying that he came not to abolish the Law and Prophets, but to fulfil them. Christian theologians have subsequently differed over precisely how the Old Testament law operates under the New Covenant.

But Jesus gives his followers a remarkably powerful organising principle.

Love God.

Love your neighbour.

That leaves Christians with a difficult question.

What happens when our interpretation of everything else causes us to stop doing the second?

Paul and Sexual Morality

A considerable amount of Christian teaching on sexuality comes from Paul.

That shouldn’t surprise us.

Paul was trying to establish Christian communities among Gentiles: people who had not grown up within Jewish religious law and culture. Acts describes Paul as a tentmaker and records the development of his ministry among Gentiles.

Paul therefore spends considerable time explaining how Christians should live.

But there is a danger when Christians extract teachings about sexuality from that much larger conversation and turn them into Christianity’s defining concern.

Christianity becomes primarily about somebody else’s behaviour.

And Christianity is much harder than that.

Because Christianity continually turns the examination back onto us.

Christianity Is Supposed to Be Personal

It is relatively easy to identify what we think someone else is doing wrong.

Christianity asks something considerably more uncomfortable:

What am I doing wrong?

Am I loving?

Am I forgiving?

Am I honest?

Am I generous?

Am I compassionate?

Do I love my neighbour?

Do I forgive my enemies?

Do I care for people who are suffering?

Do I treat other people as I would want them to treat me?

Those questions don’t allow us to hide behind somebody else’s perceived shortcomings.

And Jesus gives us an extraordinarily vivid warning about precisely this behaviour:

“And why beholdest thou the mote that is in thy brother’s eye, but considerest not the beam that is in thine own eye?” Matthew 7:3, King James Version

The image is almost comical.

Someone has a tiny speck in their eye.

We rush over to point it out.

Meanwhile, we have a piece of timber sticking out of our own.

Jesus’s answer isn’t to become better at examining the other person’s eye.

Look at yourself first.

Why Is Someone Else’s Life So Important?

That brings us back to gay people.

Suppose, for the sake of argument, that a Christian sincerely believes a particular relationship is inconsistent with traditional Christian sexual teaching.

What happens next?

Does that belief give the Christian permission to hate someone?

No.

Does it give the Christian permission to humiliate them?

No.

Does it remove the obligation to love them as a neighbour?

No.

Does it make their perceived sin more important than the Christian’s own?

That is where the beam and the mote become uncomfortable.

Because Christianity was never supposed to be a convenient mechanism for cataloguing everybody else’s failures.

It is supposed to transform us.

When Righteousness Becomes Self-Righteousness

This connects directly with the distinction I have made elsewhere about righteousness.

Righteousness is not a right. It is a status.

Being in right standing with God doesn’t give me rights over somebody else.

It gives me responsibilities concerning how I live.

Yet righteousness can easily mutate into self-righteousness.

Instead of asking:

“Am I living rightly before God?”

we begin asking:

“Why aren’t those people living the way I think they should?”

That shift is enormously attractive because examining somebody else is much easier than examining ourselves.

It gives us someone to blame.

Someone to condemn.

Someone against whom we can define ourselves as righteous.

And eventually somebody to hate.

Christianity Contains Its Own Warning About Deception

Christianity also contains another powerful warning.

The Christian tradition describes Satan as the great deceiver.

Revelation uses exactly that imagery:

“And the great dragon was cast out, that old serpent, called the Devil, and Satan, which deceiveth the whole world…” Revelation 12:9, King James Version

The frightening thing about deception is that someone who has been successfully deceived usually doesn’t believe they have been deceived.

So perhaps Christians should be willing to ask an uncomfortable question.

What if someone persuaded us that hatred was righteousness?

What if contempt was presented as faithfulness?

What if cruelty was described as defending Christianity?

What if we became so frightened of another group of human beings that we stopped seeing them as our neighbours?

And what if political or religious leaders discovered that our fear could be converted into power?

Christianity itself should give Christians the intellectual and spiritual tools to recognise that danger.

We Have Seen What Dehumanisation Can Do

History gives us good reason to be cautious whenever political movements convince populations that particular groups are responsible for society’s problems.

Once someone’s humanity is replaced by a label, mistreatment becomes easier to justify.

Christianity should resist that process rather than provide religious language that helps legitimise it.

Christian leaders therefore carry an enormous responsibility when talking about gay people, reproductive rights, immigrants, Muslims, Jews or anybody else who can conveniently be transformed into them.

A Christian leader can disagree.

A Christian leader can teach doctrine.

A Christian leader can hold traditional beliefs.

But when those beliefs become a pathway towards contempt or hatred of another human being, Christians should stop and examine what is happening.

Love Is the Hard Part

Perhaps this is why Christianity is difficult.

Hatred is easy.

Blame is easy.

Identifying somebody else’s faults is easy.

Finding a group responsible for everything we think is wrong with society is easy.

Christianity demands something considerably harder.

Love God.

Love your neighbour.

Examine yourself.

Forgive.

Show mercy.

Control your own behaviour.

And somehow continue doing those things when the person standing in front of you believes something completely different from you.

That is much harder than condemning someone.

So Why Do Christians Hate Gay People?

Many don’t.

And Christians who retain traditional beliefs about sexuality should not automatically be described as hateful simply because they hold those beliefs.

But where Christians do express hatred towards gay people, Christianity gives them remarkably little room to hide from an obvious question:

Where did Jesus tell you to hate your neighbour?

Christians can debate sexuality.

Christians can debate marriage.

Christians can debate the meaning of porneia.

Christians can debate Paul.

Christians can debate how Old Testament law relates to the New Covenant.

Those theological conversations will continue.

But Jesus made something much harder to debate:

Love God.

Love your neighbour.

And perhaps when Christians become more interested in somebody else’s sexuality than in whether they themselves are loving their neighbour, it is worth remembering the man with the beam sticking out of his eye.

Because Jesus gave Christians two great commandments.

Neither says:

Love your neighbour, unless your neighbour is gay.